Sunday, 20 December 2015

I found a wonderfully informative site I wasn't aware of, by an author whose talents at conveying complex concepts to a lay audience exceed my own. Even though I'm the one who's supposed to have a Grad Cert in Science Communication from the ANU.

It's Liz - Day by Day, a blog that apparently started as a record of Transition, but has since become an excellent resource on the science of Sex and Gender.

A bit like this blog, though I started it many years before my own atypical and non-volitional transition. (Zoe kicks herself again for not doing it earlier, not having the courage to).

Anyway, from this site, a graphic illustration of one area of the brain where women tend to have one structural pattern (OK, we've not found any exceptions, just degrees) and men another.

As they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Now onto Neuroplasticity - the quality of the brain to change its structure due to environment.

"But
wait," argue the anti-sex difference authors, "the brain is
plastic"-that is, molded by experience. One group of authors uses the
word plasticity in the title of their paper three times to make sure we understand its importance.29 (As
someone who has studied brain plasticity for more than 35 years, I find
the implication that it never occurred to me amusing.) By the
plasticity argument-also made explicitly by neuroscientist Lise Eliot in
her book Pink Brain Blue Brain-small sex differences in human brains at birth are increased by culture's influence on the brain's plasticity.30 Eliot
further argues that we can avoid "troublesome gaps" between the
behaviors of adult men and women (a curious contradiction, by the way,
of the view that there are no behavioral differences between the sexes)
by encouraging boys and girls to learn against their inborn tendencies.

It is critical to understand where the fallacies in this argument
lie. First, it is false to conclude that because a particular behavior
starts small in children and grows, that behavior has little or no
biological basis. One has only to think of handedness, walking, and
language to see the point. Second, this argument presupposes that human
"cultural" influences are somehow formed independent of the existing
biological predispositions of the human brain. But third, and most
important, is the key fallacy in the plasticity argument: the
implication that the brain is perfectly plastic. It is not. The brain is plastic only within the limits set by biology.

To understand this critical point, consider handedness. It is
indeed possible, thanks to the brain's plasticity, to force a child with
a slight tendency to use her left hand to become a right-handed adult.
But that does not mean that this practice is a good idea, or that the
child is capable of becoming as facile with her right hand as she might
have become with her left had she been allowed to develop her natural
tendencies unimpeded. The idea that we should use the brain's plasticity
to work against inborn masculine or feminine predispositions in the
brains of children is as ill conceived as the idea that we should
encourage left-handed children to use their right hand.

Thursday, 17 December 2015

" I don’t want to reach the evil fuckers and give them more information, to teach them how to con more Lesbians. I want them gone permanently. "

Pseudo, you’re right — they’re the ones who kept taking about violence and murder. But really, they should be careful about giving some angry women those ideas. I can’t imagine that every one of them hasn’t raped or molested a female at some point. They’re male and that’s what males do!

I knew those fuckers were disgusting, but really, they’re worse than I thought in how they don’t even pretend to care about females. To blame us for them being killed by other men? Their arrogance and oppressiveness is amazing. It is funny though that they are so used to Feminists immediately bowing before them that they don’t know how to deal with that we don’t care what happens to them. They expect we’ll be shocked to see statistics about them being killed, and don’t realize, some of us wish they would ALL be dead.

oh my god, Margaret and Fab — I can just imagine their gloating if they can get female body parts and reproduce (not to mention how reproduction is destroying the earth and the likelihood of birth defects and bad health from babies coming from such a place.) There are no words to describe them. There are tiny parasitic wasps who paralyse small animals (spiders, caterpillars, etc.) and lay their eggs on them, so the animal is alive while being slowing eaten by the growing baby. But the wasps aren’t deliberately cruel. These men remind me of a deliberately female-hating version of that. They’ve prove what I’ve been saying for decades — they are more female-hating than even many het men. The character in Silence of the Lambs who skinned women to wear really seems more accurate all the time.

Thanks, Sharon. I agree it’s good to get and share support from all
potential allies, but it’s loaded for me when you name someone who I
feel oppressed by and censored (Dirt) — or plagiarized by (as in the
case of Sheila Jeffries, who got some of her politics from us and our
book.) Because of her academic privilege, she’s in a position to reach
more, and I’m glad about that, but quoting her to me as if I hadn’t been
writing about the trans cult for years earlier is annoying to me.

About Me

Actually, I am a Rocket Scientist.
Also hormonally odd (my blood has 46xy chromosomes anyway) and for most of my life, I looked male, and lived as one, trying to be the best Man a Gal could be. Anyway, in May 2005 that started changing naturally for reasons still unclear, and I'm now Zoe, not Alan : happier and more relaxed not to have to pretend any more.
UPDATE - reason now identified as the 3BHSD form of CAH.

Reviews

This blog, written by a rocket scientist, is a fascinating collection of information, both personal and scientific, regarding intersex, transsexualism and related psychosocial and psychosexual issues....It is erudite and heartfelt. Just read the posts about the passport issue. You won't know whether to laugh, weep or crawl into a ball and rock gently in a corner - an amazing person.- David---The reason I so appreciate bright, perceptive people - as opposed to ideologues whose intelligence does little to illuminate - is that they manage to both instruct and learn with a certain grace. Among such rarities in the transblogosphere is Zoe, whose direct speech and clear humanity always make her worth reading, even if one doesn’t always agree with her every conclusion.- Val---The following is a request for permission to archive your A.E.Brain blog site which we have wanted to do for several years...The Library has traditionally collected items in print, but it is also committed to preserving electronic publications of lasting cultural value....Since (1996) we have been identifying online publications and archiving those that we consider have national significance....We would like to include A.E.Brain blog site in the PANDORA Archive...-Australian National Library